subrealism

Tuesday, March 03, 2015

WaPo | Nowadays, Marshall would be called a foreign-policy realist. He argued
that the United States was risking its position and prestige in the
Middle East just to placate a domestic lobby. He further insisted that
the beneficiary of Truman’s Palestine policy would be the Soviet Union.
To put it succinctly, Truman took the side of a tiny people with no oil
against a plenteous people with lots of it.

Nothing
much has changed since then. Israel now has some offshore energy, but
it’s hardly an emerging Saudi Arabia. It still is loathed by its
neighbors and, to complicate matters, it persists in a settlements
policy that the United States opposes
and much of the world abhors. Nonetheless, Americans by and large
support Israel, and Washington, even under the supposedly cool Barack
Obama, maintains a very special relationship with it. That, now, is in danger.

But
the fault line in the U.S.-Israel relationship is hardly the current
clash of personalities. Instead, it’s that the relationship is based
mainly on affection. Americans like Israel. They like its democratic
values and they like its spunky underdogness. Conservative Christians
like Israel for reasons having to do with religious dogma but they, too,
have come to admire it for its secular values. Still, none of this is
based on self-interest — the underpinning of a successful foreign
policy. In power politics, it’s usually not enough to be liked. A nation
has to be considered essential. Israel may be beloved, but for American
security, it is not essential.

The fact is that the United States does not need
Israel. Our special relationship was not forged, as it was with Great
Britain, in two world wars, not to mention a common language and, in
significant respects, culture. It is based on warmth, emotion, shared
values — and, not to be dismissed, a potent domestic lobby. But these
ties are eroding. Support for Israel remains strong, but where once it
was universal, it has increasingly drifted from left to right. In the
liberal community, hostility toward Israel is unmistakable. Some of it
is openly expressed, some of it merely whispered.

Netanyahu has made matters worse. He has tethered Israel to the Republican Party.
He was criticized for seeming to prefer Mitt Romney to Obama in 2012
and now has been enlisted to speak to Congress in a partisan effort by
the Republican House speaker
to embarrass the president. In doing so, he dissed an American
president who happens to be black, hardly a way to shore up support in
the African American community. (Many African American members of Congress say they will boycott the speech.)
Netanyahu has started — or exacerbated — a process in which support for
Israel may become not just a partisan issue, but a liberal-conservative
one.

aljazeera | According to conservatives, political correctness was hampering free
speech, restricting behavior and hindering ostensibly objective
policies such as school admissions. America the great, birthplace of
freedom and liberty, taken hostage by college students armed with ideas
from Franz Fanon, Judith Butler or Michel Foucault and a rising tide of
people who insisted their identities and experiences be accurately
described and taken into account. I was one of those college students
and was rigorously trained to deconstruct everything from your coffee
cup to your favorite television show to ensure you understand the full
meaning of what you are seeing, hearing and saying.

Building off the civil rights movement and feminist activism of the
late 1960s and early 1970s, identity politics as a field emerged in
response to the unfair treatment that people from marginalized groups
received in daily life and the ways in which American culture did not
reflect or include our experience or realities. Identity politics
emerged in academia as a response to history’s not including the plight
of Native Americans, women or black people. It was a response to
racism, sexism and homophobia that pushed back on the assumption that
everyone was straight, white, cisgender and middle-class. Identity
politics — also known as the fields of women’s studies, ethnic studies,
African-American studies, queer studies and the like — paved the way
for Edward Said to study colonization’s role in how the West
understands “the Orient,” Kimberle Crenshaw to consider a politics of
intersectionality and the powerlessness of women invisible to the legal
system and Audre Lorde to insist that her words as a lesbian and woman
of color mattered.

This group of supposed pc bullies paved the way for generations to feel
as though they belong to something even if they don’t see themselves
reflected in the world around them. The development of identity
politics was a transformative moment: the beginning of a push to make
the country a more inclusive, less hateful place for those who are
different — the very values politicians of all stripes tout as a great
characteristic of a great nation. It was also an important intervention
to political dialogue and intellectual thought production and pushed
academic institutions to be more thorough and rigorous in their
assumptions, values and research. And it refuted the idea that there is
an objective truth, as opposed to subjective realities, when it comes
to telling stories about our lives.

But the rise of identity politics as an academic, political and
cultural movement came with some baggage. A side effect of people
feeling invisible for generations is anger. While identity politics
pushed culture and politics, it also released decades of anger and
animosity that previously went unexpressed in our finest educational
institutions. This scared those who preferred to assume that everyone
was happy in the good old days or believed that certain ideas were
universally true. Of course, fear and anger had always been under the
surface; it just finally had a chance to breath.

This isn’t to say that the sanctimonious overreliance on saying the
right thing can’t be distracting and self-serving. Looking back at my
college activism, I am slightly embarrassed by the emotional energy and
time I spent judging other people’s politics and decisions. It was a
natural part of growing into a political thinker and differentiating
myself, but in other ways it distracted me from looking at broader
issues outside my day-to-day life.

Monday, March 02, 2015

pbs | Follow the story of Swedish researcher Gunnar Myrdal whose landmark 1944 study, An American Dilemma,
probed deep into the United States' racial psyche. The film weaves a
narrative that exposes some of the potential underlying causes of racial
biases still rooted in America’s systems and institutions today.

An intellectual social visionary who later won a Nobel Prize in
economics, Myrdal first visited the Jim Crow South at the invitation of
the Carnegie Corporation in 1938, where he was “shocked to the core by
all the evils [he] saw.” With a team of scholars that included black
political scientist Ralph Bunche, Myrdal wrote his massive 1,500-page
investigation of race, now considered a classic.

An American Dilemma
challenged the veracity of the American creed of equality, justice, and
liberty for all. It argued that critically implicit in that creed —
which Myrdal called America’s “state religion” — was a more shameful
conflict: white Americans explained away the lack of opportunity for
blacks by labeling them inferior. Myrdal argued that this view justified
practices and policies that openly undermined and oppressed the lives
of black citizens. Seventy years later, are we still a society living in
this state of denial, in an era marked by the election of the nation’s
first black president?

American Denial sheds light on the unconscious political and
moral world of modern Americans, using archival footage, newsreels,
nightly news reports, and rare southern home movies from the ‘30s and
‘40s, as well as research footage, websites, and YouTube films showing
psychological testing of racial attitudes. Exploring “stop-and-frisk”
practices, the incarceration crisis, and racially-patterned poverty, the
film features a wide array of historians, psychologists, and
sociologists who offer expert insight and share their own personal,
unsettling stories. The result is a unique and provocative film that
challenges our assumptions about who we are and what we really believe.

slate | On Feb. 6, Obama went to Indiana and lauded Dick Lugar, the state’s former Republican senator. The next day, in his weekly radio address, he repeated:
“I’ll work with anyone, Republican or Democrat, who wants to get to
‘yes.’ … We should stop refighting old battles and start working
together.” Even last Friday, in his speech to the Democratic National Committee,
five of Obama’s nine references to Republicans were positive. “If
Republicans are serious about taking on the specific challenges that
face the middle class,” he pleaded, “we should welcome them.”

That’s how Obama treats his domestic adversaries. He doesn’t take the
bait. He doesn’t define the whole opposition party by its worst
elements. He rejects polarization. He emphasizes shared values. He
reminds his own partisans that they, too, are sinners.

For Democrats, this can be exasperating. It’s especially exasperating
when Republicans refuse to take responsibility for, or even disown, outbursts from their colleagues, such as Rep. Joe Wilson’s “You lie!” or Rudy Giuliani’s “I do not believe that the president loves America.” Rep.
Darrell Issa, who as chairman of the House oversight committee has led
investigations of the Obama administration, claims Giuliani didn’t deny
that Obama loves America—“He said he didn't believe” Obama loves America. Gov. Bobby Jindal of Louisiana, a 2016 presidential hopeful, says of Giuliani’s remark: “If you are looking for someone to condemn the mayor, look elsewhere.” Gov. Mike Pence of Indiana backs up Giuliani’s insinuation
that Obama favors the enemy over his own country: “[Giuliani]
is understandably frustrated with a president who, as I said before, is
fully willing to lecture the people of this country about the Crusades
but is unwilling to call Islamic extremism for what it is.”

Please. If we’re going to start calling out religious and political
groups for extremism, we could start at home with Republicans. Too many
of them spew animus. Too many foment sectarianism. Too many sit by, or
make excuses, as others appeal to tribalism. If Obama were to treat them
the way they say he should treat Islam—holding the entire faith
accountable for its ugliest followers—they’d squeal nonstop about
slander and demagogy. They’re lucky that’s not his style.

Sunday, March 01, 2015

nbcnews | The city of Cleveland claims the
death of 12-year-old Tamir Rice at the hands of a police officer and the
"losses" suffered by his family were a result of the boy's and his
family's own actions that day. The city's denial of any wrongdoing was
filed Friday in response to a wrongful death lawsuit brought by lawyers
for the Rice family last month.

The city wrote that
Tamir's injuries were caused by him failing to "exercise due care." In
addition, the complaints brought on behalf of Tamir's sister and mother
were also "directly caused by their own acts" — not the officers
involved, the response said.

Tamir was fatally shot on Nov. 22 by
Cleveland rookie cop Timothy Loehmann, who with his partner, Frank
Garmback, were called to a recreation center where Tamir was holding a
pellet gun. Police responding to the scene initially believed the pellet
gun, which did not have an orange tip identifying it as a replica, was
real. Loehmann fired on Tamir within less than two seconds of arriving,
surveillance footage shows, and the boy died in the hospital the next
day.

bostonglobe | Is white racism a kind of toxic cloud that drifts over our
country, invisible to many or most white-skinned citizens but
terrifyingly visible to the black and brown-skinned? We may believe —
with good reason — that we are not racists; but does our passivity or
indifference to the racism of others make us their enablers? It is
stunning to learn that hundreds of millions of dollars are paid out
annually in court settlements to victims of police brutality or
misconduct — and these millions are paid by taxpayers. In effect,
unwittingly, yet not altogether innocently, we are all supporting police
brutality and misconduct.

In the late 1990s, while I was being driven back home to
Princeton from a literary event in New York City, a New Jersey state
police vehicle stopped the car. It was not evident why; the driver had
not been speeding or driving erratically, and there was nothing wrong
with the Lincoln Town Car.

Two state troopers demanded that the (black) driver show them his
driver’s license and the auto registration. They then ordered him to get
out of the car. What I could hear of their interrogation was repeated
questions: Where are you going? Where do you live? Whose car is this?

No
doubt accustomed to being harassed by white law enforcement, the driver
answered the questions in a quiet and courteous voice. Yet the officers
kept repeating the questions, as if they had some reason to suspect
that the driver was lying. Seeing me in the back seat, they walked the
driver away from the car, along the shoulder of the highway, and
proceeded to interrogate him for what seemed like a very long time — 40
minutes? By this time I had called my husband on my cell phone and told
him about the situation — “I don’t know when I will get home,” I
remember telling him.

I do remember opening the door of the limousine, thinking that I would
stand outside, but one of the troopers yelled angrily at me: “Get back
inside that car, lady!”

Whatever they were saying to the black driver, however they might
have been threatening him, they did not want a witness. Especially, they
did not want a white woman witness.

How naive it seems to me now
to have imagined that I might have been a more helpful witness to what
was obviously, in retrospect, a flagrant example of police profiling. At
the time, I did not even have a cell phone that could record anything;
it was a very minimal phone, indeed. And I have to confess, what I felt
when the trooper yelled at me was sheer visceral fear, dread — there was
no way, there is no way, that a lone individual can stand up to law
enforcement officers who are not only armed but, usually, physically
domineering. Out on the Jersey Turnpike, in the dark, as traffic rushes
past, no one can assert his or her rights to the police without inviting
immediate retaliation.

Saturday, February 28, 2015

aljazeera | Overseas the moustacheless, bushy beard is not so identifiably hip-hop
and has caused considerable controversy, with security officials in
Europe and the Middle East mistaking the Philly for a jihadi beard. In
February 2014, for instance, Lebanese police arrested Hussein
Sharaffedine (aka Double A the Preacherman), 32, a Shia rapper and
frontman for a local funk band. Internal Security Forces mistook him
for a Salafi militant and handcuffed and detained him for 24 hours. In
Europe hip-hop heads such as French rapper Médine — a Black Powerite
who wears a fierce beard that he calls “the Afro beneath my jaw” —
complain of police harassment. French fashion magazines joke now
crudely about "hipsterrorisme." European journalists are descending on
Philadelphia to trace the roots of what they call la barbe sunnah and
Salafi hipsterism.

But there is more to the story than these superficial inquiries. The
synergy between Islam and black music in Philadelphia has a long
history. As such, the global spread of the moustacheless beard cannot
be understood in isolation from the rich blending that took place
between various strands of Islam and music in black America.

City of Brotherly Love

Philadelphia’s Muslim elders are quick to list the jazz greats who
lived in or came out of the City of Brotherly Love since the 1930s —
John Coltrane, Lynn Hope, Pharoah Saunders, Sun Ra, McCoy Tyner, George
Jordan and the Heath Brothers. Many of these artists had an intimate
relationship with Islam. Saxophonist Hope was featured prominently in
Ebony magazine’s famous 1953 article on Muslim jazz artists, sitting on
the floor of his Philadelphia home smoking hookah with his two young
sons in fezzes.

“The history of Islam in Philadelphia is reflected in the music. Some
artists were openly Muslim, others more private,” says Imam Nadim Ali,
a celebrated jazz deejay and community leader who spent his youth in
Philadelphia. “We knew Pharaoh Sanders as Abdulmufti. One of his first
albums from 1966 was called “Tawhid.” Likewise, George Howard was a
great funk/smooth-jazz artist. Kenny G co-opted his style. We knew
Howard as Tahir — I grew up with him in West Philly. But when he died,
his family buried him in a Christian cemetery. This sometimes happens
when converts to Islam don’t leave a will.”

Jazz artists in the 1940s and ’50s came to Islam through the Ahmadiyya
movement, a heterodox Islamic movement that emerged in 19th century
India and developed a significant presence in Philadelphia. As the
Nation of Islam gained followers, it cast its cultural influence on the
music scene. Sun Ra, who lived in Germantown for 25 years, for
instance, was not Muslim. But he claimed to be a distant cousin of
Nation of Islam founder Elijah Muhammad and was inspired by the
movement’s teachings. Sun Ra traveled to Cairo and collaborated with
Egyptian drummer Salah Ragab, recording numbers such as “Ramadan in
Space Time.”

As members of soul and R&B groups such as the Delfonics, the Five
Stairsteps, the Moments, Kool & the Gang and Earth, Wind & Fire
embraced Islam in the 1960s, the dialogue and tensions between Sunni
Islam and the Nation of Islam found expression in music in various
cities. In Philadelphia old heads recall Kool & the Gang’s visiting
from New Jersey in the early 1970s to perform songs such as “Whiting
H&G” (a reference to the frozen fish that the Nation of Islam was
selling) and “Fruitman,” both tracks praising the Nation of Islam’s
economic initiatives and dietary rules. Even non-Muslim artists paid
homage to what they saw as a positive movement that taught
self-reliance. Philly native and Grammy-winning crooner Billy Paul
never embraced Islam, but he recorded an album called “Going East” in
1971 and gave a shout-out to Muhammad and Malcolm X in his 1976 track
“Let ’Em In” — perhaps the first popular song to sample a speech by
Malcolm X (“You’ve been misled/ You’ve been had/ You’ve been took …”),
years before hip-hop artists began doing so.

Urban renewal
At the heart of these decades-old attempts to use faith and art for
community building stands Luqman Abdul Haqq, a real-estate developer
who has harnessed the energies of diverse Muslim groups to revitalize
Philadelphia’s southeast area. Better known as Kenny Gamble, he is the
founder of Philadelphia International Records and is considered one of
the fathers of disco and R&B — specifically, a subgenre called the
Philadelphia sound. In the 1970s, with longtime partner Leon Huff, he
recorded dozens of hits for artists such as the O’Jays, Teddy
Pendergrass and Patti Labelle, producing almost 200 gold and platinum
records.

In the early 1990s, Luqman moved back to Philly and established
Universal Companies, a nonprofit that includes a housing-development
initiative, a charter school and a social services agency. Universal
has since refurbished more than 1,000 homes and created enclaves where
Muslims own businesses and live near mosques. “We are continuing the
cultural revolution that began among African-Americans in the 1960s, a
cultural revolution based on Islam,” he says. “The Nation of Islam was
a vehicle that came to the need of African-Americans, teaching do for
self.”

aljazeera | On January 1, the French rapper Medine uploaded his latest track "Don't
Laik".

Surrounded by youth from the banlieues, he sounds off against
secularism, taking swipes at Nietszche and the neo-conservative
journalist Caroline Fouret, a former staffer at Charlie Hebdo. His
harshest words are directed at the French system of laicite, which bans
headscarves in public institutions and burqas in all public spaces.

About a week later - just after the attacks on Charlie Hebdo, Medine
was back in the news again, this time explaining his lyrics, noting
that when he rapped about crucifying "les laicards" and chopping down
the "tree of their secularism" - he was actually presenting a
"caricature" of secularism; that version which looks down upon the
religiously observant. His critique of laicite, he said, was very much
in the spirit of Charlie Hebdo.

Hip hop in France - and in Western Europe more broadly - has come under
scrutiny in the last few weeks. Prominent French artists - Youssoupha,
Diam's, Kool Shen, Maitre Gims, Oxmo Puccino - have denounced the
attacks in no uncertain terms, some even composing impromptu tracks in
honour of the victims.

Called for explanations
But hip hop artists have also been called upon to explain the reasons
for youth alienation, and the relationship between hip hop and
extremism. The fact that Cherif Kouachi, the younger brother, was at
one point an aspiring rapper, featured in a television documentary,
where he is up on stage, cap backwards, rapping and dancing, has
counterterrorism experts again asking if youth are radicalised through
rap.

Friday, February 27, 2015

Slate | The two men arrested in New York this week for attempting to travel to
Syria to fight for ISIS might at first seem to be a confirmation of the
warnings often voiced by politicians and law enforcement
that the group poses a threat not just in the Middle East but to the
U.S. homeland. These were, after all, young men radicalized through the
Internet who expressed a desire to either travel to Syria to wage war or
carry out attacks at home. But a Times story this week
under the wonderful headline “Eager to Join ISIS, if Only His Mother
Would Return His Passport,” is pretty reassuring about the actual level
of threat the group poses to the U.S.

The fact that this plot to wage holy war against the infidel depended
on 19-year-old Akhror Saidakhmetov being able to sweet-talk his mom
into giving him back his passport isn’t the only indication in the FBI’s case against the men, released just after their arrest, that we aren’t exactly dealing with future Bin Ladens here.

The men first popped onto the FBI’s radar when Abdurasul Juraboev
wrote a post on an Uzbek-language website last August saying that he
wanted to shoot Barack Obama and asking whether he could swear his
loyalty to ISIS in absentia. When the FBI paid a visit to him, he not
only acknowledged writing the post and acknowledged a desire to fight
for ISIS and kill Obama, he put it in writing and identified
Saidakhmetov as someone who shared his ambitions.

HuffPo | Spelling more trouble for organized labor in the U.S., Republican
legislators in the Wisconsin state Senate approved a right-to-work bill
here on Wednesday, sending the measure to a GOP-controlled Assembly
where it's also expected to pass. Republican leaders chose to fast-track
the bill in what's known as an extraordinary legislative session,
allowing for less debate than usual.

Debate over the bill drew an estimated 2,000 protesters
to the state Capitol on both Tuesday and Wednesday, reminiscent of the
passionate labor demonstrations surrounding Act 10 in 2011, though
vastly smaller in scope. As with that earlier legislation, which
stripped most collective bargaining rights from public-sector employees,
vocal opposition from the state's unions wasn't enough to stop the
right-to-work bill in its tracks.

Legislators are expected to take
up the measure early next week in the state Assembly, where Republicans
enjoy a comfortable majority. The office of Gov. Scott Walker (R) has
already said he will sign the bill if it reaches his desk.

The fight in Madison is just the latest indication of how state
Republican leaders, often controlling both the statehouse and the
governor's mansion in their respective states, are managing to enact
laws that weaken the clout of organized labor. If the Wisconsin measure
is approved, the Badger State will become the 25th right-to-work state in the country, following two other Midwestern states, Michigan and Indiana, that passed such laws in 2012.

"It
is a symbolic tipping point, or an inflection point," Paul Secunda, a
labor law professor at Marquette University Law School in Milwaukee,
said of potentially half the states in the country being right-to-work.
"For the longest time there were 22 right-to-work states. Now the
right-to-work people have the momentum."

Thursday, February 26, 2015

The Archdruid Report | Now of course there are plenty of arguments that could be deployed against this modest proposal. For example, it could be argued that progress doesn't have to generate a rising tide of externalities. The difficulty with this argument is that externalization of costs isn't an accidental side effect of technology but an essential aspect—it’s not a bug, it’s a feature. Every technology is a means of externalizing some cost that would otherwise be borne by a human body. Even something as simple as a hammer takes the wear and tear that would otherwise affect the heel of your hand, let’s say, and transfers it to something else: directly, to the hammer; indirectly, to the biosphere, by way of the trees that had to be cut down to make the charcoal to smelt the iron, the plants that were shoveled aside to get the ore, and so on.

For reasons that are ultimately thermodynamic in nature, the more complex a technology becomes, the more costs it generates. In order to outcompete a simpler technology, each more complex technology has to externalize a significant proportion of its additional costs, in order to compete against the simpler technology. In the case of such contemporary hypercomplex technosystems as the internet, the process of externalizing costs has gone so far, through so many tangled interrelationships, that it’s remarkably difficult to figure out exactly who’s paying for how much of the gargantuan inputs needed to keep the thing running. This lack of transparency feeds the illusion that large systems are cheaper than small ones, by making externalities of scale look like economies of scale.

It might be argued instead that a sufficiently stringent regulatory environment, forcing economic actors to absorb all the costs of their activities instead of externalizing them onto others, would be able to stop the degradation of whole systems while still allowing technological progress to continue. The difficulty here is that increased externalization of costs is what makes progress profitable. As just noted, all other things being equal, a complex technology will on average be more expensive in real terms than a simpler technology, for the simple fact that each additional increment of complexity has to be paid for by an investment of energy and other forms of real capital.

Strip complex technologies of the subsidies that transfer some of their costs to the government, the perverse regulations that transfer some of their costs to the rest of the economy, the bad habits of environmental abuse and neglect that transfer some of their costs to the biosphere, and so on, and pretty soon you’re looking at hard economic limits to technological complexity, as people forced to pay the full sticker price for complex technologies maximize their benefits by choosing simpler, more affordable options instead. A regulatory environment sufficiently strict to keep technology from accelerating to collapse would thus bring technological progress to a halt by making it unprofitable.

Forbes | Big Data and Big Data analytics have become hot topics in recent
years. Unlike traditional methods of cause and effect deduction, Big
Data analytics generate predictions based on such enormous volumes of
data, that only the tools of association and inference are useful for
finding relevance or meaning.

An interesting case study on the use of Big Data analytics was the prediction of a flu pandemic in the United States by GoogleGOOGL+1.6%. The
Internet giant detected the spread of a flu virus before any medical
organization or national agency based on search results data that showed
people researching flu symptoms and remedies. Google’s findings were
completely aligned with the health authority reports filed after the flu
pandemic occurred.

Big Data analytics enables us to generate reliable analyses, even in the absence of clear links or causes.

So why so long before we could begin to leverage the value of Big
Data? For one, the processing and analysis of large volumes of data
required advanced computing and storage resources not yet available.

New types of database management systems have also needed to be
devised. Traditional databases use data synchronization techniques to
determine causality and, while Big Data analytics do not require the use
of synchronization for the same purpose, it gives rise to other
challenges in the areas of networking, storage, and computational
architecture.

WaPo | By the time Heiney graduated in August 2014, she said she had racked
up $18,810 in debt, with nearly 80 percent coming from federal loans.
This month marks the end of the six-month grace period on her student
loans, which means the government will starting asking Heiney for its
money. But she won’t pay.

Heiney has landed a job as a
home-health care attendant, but still feels trapped. “Don’t get me
wrong. I’m happy to have my job, but my dream is to go back to Africa
and start a medical clinic. Because I’m now a slave to these loans I
can’t pursue my dreams,” she said.

Heiney and the other 14
protesters have been working with an offshoot of the Occupy Wall Street
movement known as the Debt Collective. The group organized a campaign last year,
called Rolling Jubilee, to buy student loans from debt buyers for cents
on the dollar and wipe out the debt. To date, the campaign has erased
over $30 million in medical and education debt, including $13 million in
private student loans for Everest students.

Organizers reached
out to Corinthian students as the for-profit schools ran into trouble.
After months of pleading with the Education Department to forgive the
federal loans, the students and the organizers came up with the idea for
the strike, said Ann Larson, a Debt Collective organizer.

More
than 100 borrowers have contacted the group since the strike started
this week. Before any of them can join, they must attend a financial
literacy workshop on the consequences of not repaying their debt, Larson
said, noting that most people are already in default.

An
attorney working with the Collective is helping the Corinthian students
file what’s known as a defense to repayment claim, an appeal to the
Education Department to discharge the federal loans on the grounds that
the for-profit school broke the law.

“Our
attorneys say it’s a very untested law and no one has really done it
because the process is unclear,” Larson said. “But rather than wait for
the Department of Ed to clarify the process, we’re just going to dispute
the legitimacy of the debt and see what happens.”

theatlantic | What I found alarming was the fact that those other cops didn't stop or report the bad apples.

In fact, even after higher-ranking officers were alerted to Sampson's
experience, that did not put an end to his repeated jailing. Neither a
public defender nor a judge was able to spot or stop this miscarriage of
justice either. No one inside the system successfully exposed or
remedied the abusive situation. Things only changed for Sampson when the
store owner got video evidence and took it to the media. And even then,
the egregious misbehavior of the police officers went unpunished.

Most of the perpetrators are still on the job.

What do police officers make of this story? How do they explain the
fact that such abusive behavior continued for so long? What do they
regard as an appropriate punishment? What would they suggest to guard
against similar abuses elsewhere? What would they do if they encountered
fellow officers treating a man this way? I don't mean to suggest that
police are of one mind about this or any other controversy, or that
Miami Gardens reflects how police behave everywhere. But when the public
reads or listens to stories that document egregious police abuses, it
is rare to encounter any members of the police community who express
alarm, or champion reforms, or denounce the bad apples, or articulate
why they have a different view than the conventional wisdom.

If you're a police officer, maybe no one asked for your opinion on a case like this before. I invite any of your thoughts.

Wednesday, February 25, 2015

guardian |TheChicagopolice department operates an off-the-books interrogation compound, rendering Americans unable to be found by family or attorneys while locked inside what lawyers say is the domestic equivalent of a CIA black site.

The facility, a nondescript warehouse on Chicago’s west side known as Homan Square, has long been the scene of secretive work by special police units. Interviews with local attorneys and one protester who spent the better part of a day shackled in Homan Square describe operations that deny access to basic constitutional rights.

Holding people without legal counsel for between 12 and 24 hours, including people as young as 15.

At least one man was found unresponsive in a Homan Square “interview room” and later pronounced dead.

Brian Jacob Church, a protester known as one of the “Nato Three”, was held and questioned at Homan Square in 2012 following a police raid. Officers restrained Church for the better part of a day, denying him access to an attorney, before sending him to a nearby police station to be booked and charged.

bbcnews | The Dutch Sim card maker at the centre of NSA-GCHQ hacking claims has said it believes that the US and UK cyberspy agencies did indeed launch attacks on its computer systems.

However, Gemalto denied that billions of mobile device encryption keys could have been stolen as a result.

TheIntercept alleged last weekthat spies had obtained the "potential to secretly monitor" voice and data transmissions after hacking the firm.

Gemalto operates in 85 countries.

Its clients include AT&T, T-Mobile, Verizon and Sprint among more than 400 wireless network providers across the world.

GCHQ and the NSA have not commented directly on the allegations.

Fake emails

In a statement, Gemalto said it had carried out a "thorough investigation" following the claims, which were based on documents leaked by whistleblower Edward Snowden.

"The investigation into the intrusion methods described in the document and the sophisticated attacks that Gemalto detected in 2010 and 2011 give us reasonable grounds to believe that an operation by NSA and GCHQ probably happened," the company said.

It highlighted two "particularly sophisticated intrusions" that it suggested the agencies were responsible for.

WaPo | Cellphones didn’t just arrive in Pakistan. But someone could be
fooled into thinking otherwise, considering the tens of millions of
Pakistanis pouring into mobile phone stores these days.

In one
of the world’s largest — and fastest — efforts to collect biometric
information, Pakistan has ordered cellphone users to verify their
identities through fingerprints for a national database being compiled
to curb terrorism. If they don’t, their service will be shut off, an
unthinkable option for many after a dozen years of explosive growth in
cellphone usage here.

Prompted by concerns about a proliferation
of illegal and untraceable SIM cards, the directive is the most visible
step so far in Pakistan’s efforts to restore law and order after
Taliban militants killed 150 students and teachers at a school in
December. Officials said the six terrorists who stormed the school in
Peshawar were using cellphones registered to one woman who had no obvious connection to the

attackers.

But the effort to match one person to each cellphone number involves a
jaw-dropping amount of work. At the start of this year, there were 103
million SIM cards in Pakistan — roughly the number of the adult
population — that officials were not sure were valid or properly
registered. And mobile companies have until April 15 to verify the
owners of all of the cards, which are tiny chips in cellphones that
carry a subscriber’s personal security and identity information.

In the past six weeks, 53 million SIMs belonging to 38 million
residents have been verified through biometric screening, officials
said.

“Once the verification of each and every SIM is done,
coupled with blocking unverified SIMs, the terrorists will no longer
have this tool,” said a senior Interior Ministry official, who was not
authorized to speak publicly about the government’s security policy.
“The government knows that it’s an arduous job, both for the cellular
companies and their customers, but this has to be done as a national
duty.”